Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch already has a troubling mystery on his hands: finding the archer who mortally wounded Maine’s only wild wolf. Then he learns his best friend, Billy Cronk, has been released from prison after heroically defending a female guard from a stabbing. Mike comes to believe the assault was orchestrated by a wider criminal conspiracy. When the conspirators pursue Billy’s wife and children to a “safe” cabin in the woods, Mike rushes to their defense only to find himself outnumbered, outgunned—and maybe out of options.

A native of Maine, bestselling author Paul Doiron attended Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in English. THE POACHER’S SON, the first book in the Mike Bowditch series, won the Barry award, the Strand award for best first novel, and has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards in the same category. He is a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine with his wife, Kristen Lindquist.

THE KINGS OF BIG SPRING: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream by Bryan MealerTwo starred reviews! An indelible portrait of a family through three generations of boom and bust, and a legacy of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. “In his themes and vivid storytelling, Mealer invites comparison to James Mitchener (TEXAS) or J.D. Vance (HILLBILLY ELEGY). As tribute to the grit of the rural poor, as social history of dirt-and-oil Texas, and as rambunctious family saga, this work triumphs.” — Library Journal, starred review

LEFT BANK: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 by Agnes Poirier
A lively, authoritative group portrait of some of the 20th century’s most revered creative minds as they lived, loved, fought, and flourished in Paris during and after World War II. “This book defies simple description; part collective biography, part cultural history, it aims to make the generation of intellectuals who shaped the Paris of the 1940s familiar to readers. For Francophiles and informed readers interested in 20th-century cultural trends.” — Library Journal

POPPIES OF IRAQ by Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim
Findakly’s nuanced tender chronicle of her relationship with her homeland Iraq, co-written and drawn by her husband, acclaimed cartoonist Trondheim. “Small in size but large in impact, this intimate memoir is a highly relevant and compassionate story of family, community, prejudice, and the struggle to love when the forces of the world push groups apart.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

FROM LONE MOUNTAIN by John Porcellino
Porcellino shares his love of nature as he uproots his comfortable life and travels from small town to small town, experiencing America in slow motion road trip. “The rawness of Porcellino’s work, its unfiltered directness, is the essence of its charm.” — Los Angeles Timesreadmoreremove

In his lively literary biography ARTHUR AND SHERLOCK: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, Michael Sims traces the real-life inspiration for the first “scientific detective” to the renowned Dr. Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh celebrated for his uncanny diagnostic observational skills. His methods were “quite easy, gentlemen,” Dr. Bell would assure his students. “If you will only observe and put two and two together,” you, too, could deduce a man’s profession, family history and social status from the way he buttons his waistcoat.

Authors of true crime books have made a cottage industry out of analyzing what makes killers tick. Michael Cannell gives credit where credit is due in INCENDIARY: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling by profiling one of the pioneers, Dr. James A. Brussel, a New York psychiatrist who specialized in the criminal mind. After 28 attacks, Dr. Brussel, a Freudian psychiatrist who ministered to patients at Creedmoor state mental hospital, used “reverse psychology,” a precursor of criminal profiling, to identify features of the bomber — his “sexuality, race, appearance, work history and personality type.” Aside from an unseemly fight over the $26,000 reward money, the case was a genuine groundbreaker in criminal forensics.

Some horror novels, though, feel timeless whenever you happen to read them, and Kit Reed’s wondrous new ghost story MORMAMA seems to me one of those. It’s a haunted-house tale, set in Jacksonville, Fla., in which three elderly sisters, a young single mother, her 12-year-old son and an amnesiac drifter who might be related to them all, attempt to fend off the uneasy spirits also resident in the crumbling mansion they live in. Reed, who has been writing fiction of all kinds for nearly 60 years, certainly knows how to construct a traditional spooky tale, and she does that expertly in MORMAMA, alternating different voices (some living, some not), laying out complex family relationships over several generations, managing a complicated plot and then drawing everything together in a spectacular, and unexpectedly moving, conclusion.

Most of Guy Delisle’s longer graphic novels to date, like PYONGYANG and BURMA CHRONICLES, have been memoirs of his travels. HOSTAGE is neither about the Canadian cartoonist’s own experiences nor grounded in his canny observations of place: It’s the story of Christophe André, who spent almost four months in 1997 as a hostage. Kidnapped from a Doctors Without Borders office in Nazran, Ingushetia, a Russian republic near Chechnya, where he was an administrator, he was taken to Grozny and handcuffed to a radiator next to a mattress in a darkened room. That was all André knew. He didn’t speak his captors’ language, got almost no information of any kind from them, and had no way of knowing when or how he might be freed.

It’s usually a slight to argue that an artist “hasn’t found their voice yet”; in the case of the restlessly versatile Jillian Tamaki, it’s an endorsement. BOUNDLESS collects short stories that are so far apart from one another in tone and technique that they could almost pass for the work of entirely different artists. If Tamaki (the illustrator of the Book Review’s By the Book feature) has a favorite storytelling strategy, it seems to be dreaming up some kind of odd artifact of mass culture and then examining the way people react to it. readmoreremove

LASSOING THE SUN: A Year in America’s National Parks by Mark Woods
Woods decided to re-create his childhood trips to national parks with his family when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, given just months to live. More than just a book about the parks, it’s about the legacies we inherit and the ones we leave behind. “A deeply heartfelt story about why the national parks remain so integral to the American story.” — Booklistreadmoreremove

Spring is upon us, which means that everything is blooming (our sympathies to all you allergy sufferers), and where there are blooms, there are bees.

One of the U.K.’s most respected conservationists and the founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Goulson combines light-hearted tales of a child’s growing passion for nature with a deep insight into the crucial importance of the bumblebee.

It was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize and named a Barnes & Noble Discover Selection, and received rave reviews from NPR, the Seattle Times, the New York Post, and Shelf Awareness:

“A STING IN THE TALE melts memoir and conservation issues into a sweet pot, moving from subject to subject very much in the manner of a foraging bee seeking flowers… Warm and delightful: I frequently found myself wanting to put it down to go bird and bee-watching, to find for myself the species he discusses.” — Amal El-Mohtar, NPR.org

“[A STING IN THE TALE] is both a whodunit as well as a revealing study of a bug on whom we depend a great deal.” — The Seattle Times

“...Goulson transforms what could be dry material with a stinging wit.” — New York Post